India and Pakistan

Abstract

The separatist movement in the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has its roots in the 1947 partitioning of British India into the two successor states of India and Pakistan. As independence neared, the British drew up a partition plan providing only two options to the hundreds of quasi-autonomous princely states dotting the sub-continent at the time — accession either to India or Pakistan. However, the Hindu ruler of Muslim-majority J&K at that time, Maharaja Hari Singh, favoured neither of those options and, instead, clung to the ill-fated hope of retaining the shred of independence awarded only in principle to all the princely states at the moment when British paramountcy lapsed in August 1947. Indians and Pakistanis disagree fundamentally about what happened next. But the issue of J&K’s de facto accession to one or the other side was ultimately settled, in any event, not by the maharaja but on the ground in the course of the first war between India and Pakistan (1947-9). That war ended indecisively, with the state divided into two parts by a heavily fortified ceasefire line (CFL). Divided it has remained ever since, cited endlessly and fruitlessly as the unsettled ‘core issue’ in India—Pakistan relations. Over more than six decades, this issue has been battered and substantially reshaped by numerous regional storms — including Pakistan’s defeat and breakup in the 1971 Bangladesh war, the acquisition by India and Pakistan of nuclear weapons, the surfacing of a prolonged and bloody Kashmiri separatist insurgency in the final decade of the twentieth century, and, at the start of the twentyfirst century, the onset of the global war on terrorism.